Happy birthday to actress Anna Kendrick, who is 34 today. Miss Kendrick rose to fame on the strength of her appearances in a couple of the Twilight movies and Pitch Perfect. Here she is where all the hot babes belong this time of year – in the pool.
Leonard Wibberley is best known for his hilarious Cold War comedy The Mouse That Roared, which was later made into a fine movie starring Peter Sellers, but today I want to talk about a more serious Wibberley novel, The Centurion. The novel is about the Roman centurion, Longinus, who appears at several points in the Gospel, most notably when he pleads with Jesus to save his dying servant, and again during the Passion when he bears witness to Christ’s divinity. Wibberley shows us the man behind the legend, a man with the thankless job of maintaining the peace in this troublesome province of the Roman Empire, filled with people who hate and fear the Romans only slightly less than they hate each other. Longinus has served Rome for decades, and when we meet him, he is a man without dreams or ambition, who just wants to do his job, but there’s this Jewish rabbi wandering around preaching and performing miracles…stirring up the people and making procurator Pontius Pilate worried. In addition to Longinus, we also meet Jesus and his disciples, the latter of which are a long way from being the saints and legends they’ll become. It is because Longinus seeks Jesus’ help that Pilate puts him in charge of the crucifixion detail, and ultimately, gives him charge of the detail watching the grave as well. It is not a cheerful novel; no account of the Passion could be, but it is nonetheless a novel full of hope, and one that will make you think. Recommended.
Give Me LibertyCon is an all-star anthology done as a benefit for the scholarship fund named for the late founder of LibertyCon, Tim Bolgeo. There’s a lot of Tuckerizing going on here, and I probably would have enjoyed the collection more if I knew who even half of these people were.
I’m not quite done with Noir Fatale, edited by Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell, because I can only read so much noir SF/fantasy at a time. If that’s your thing, you’ll really like Noir Fatale, and if not, you should look elsewhere. Maybe at SPOTREPS, a collection of near-future combat SF concerned with a low-intensity war between Red China and the U.S., with an expy for Antifa on the side of the Chinese and a motley crew of local police, sheriffs, and militia doing most of the fighting. Edited by Peter Nealen, SPOTREPS has stories by Larry Correia, Brad Torgerson, and my buddy Jonathan LaForce, who cleverly sneaks a romance into the middle of a militia forward observer team making the lives of the “assisting” Red Chinese miserable by reaching out and touching them with 155mm artillery. Recommended.
I’m still following Komi Can’t Communicate, whose eighth volume is due out next week, because it’s a really touching story about a girl who can’t talk to people except through her phone or by writing on her notepad. There is the usual assortment of weird high-school classmates to lighten things up, but the main plot is about her normal classmate Tadano helping Komi reach her goal of making 100 friends.
As you all know, I’m hopelessly addicted to the mobile game Fate/Grand Order. If mobile games aren’t your thing, and you don’t want to wade through the jungle of visual novels, anime, and whatnot that make up the Fate franchise, I recommend Fate/Grand Order – Mortalis: Stella, the first in a series of manga that explain how little old no-talent you and your confused kouhai got drafted to (literally) save the world. Does a good job of pulling together some details that aren’t immediately clear in the game or are dealt with there in flashbacks. Recommended. On the other hand, Today’s Menu For The Emiya Family is a weird combination of manga and cookbook in which the many characters of Fate/Stay Night come by and help with dinner. If you like cookbooks with slice-of-life stories in between the recipes, this is the kind of manga you will like.
Next week, if all goes well, the final (maybe) novel in Tom Kratman’s Carreraverse and some other stuff.
So I’ve spent the past day researching, which involves viewing a lot of old YouTube videos. When I’m watching YouTube videos for my own amusement (rather than research), my preferences are fireworks, “storm chasing” and rare old Beatles sessions. Somehow, the algorithm for “suggested” videos popped up this interesting performance:
This fascinates me, because (a) how does someone so young discover an old Buddy Holly song? and (b) the arrangement is so simple. Besides her ukulele, the only instrumentation is a Takamine guitar and a Suzuki Omnichord, a 1980s-era electronic autoharp. New models sell for about $270, but the instrument is scarcely more sophisticated than many children’s toys you could buy for around $100 nowadays. The audio mix was done with Garageband software, and the video was recorded on her iPhone, edited with VideoLeap software. Even the microphone — a Shure 545S Series 2 Unidyne III — is rather cheap, less than $100 on Amazon.
My friend John Hoge worked as a recording engineer in Nashville back in the day, and can tell you what it would have cost to book studio time in the era of analog tape recording. Circa 1981, when I was chasing the rock-and-roll dream, the cheapest 8-track studio in Atlanta charged $25 an hour, at a time when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour. In other words, you’d have to work an 8-hour day at minimum wage to earn enough for one hour in the studio, and a full week’s wages wouldn’t pay for an eight-hour session. By the late 1980s, you could buy a 4-track cassette recorder for about $450 — about two-days’ pay[*], at minimum wage — but the audio quality was low (e.g., tape hiss) and it wasn’t until the late 1990s, by which time I’d outgrown my rock-and-roll dream, that home digital recording equipment became something affordable to the masses.
[* — see note below about this egregiously wrong estimate.]
Young people, in addition to their lack of knowledge of classic Buddy Holly tunes, generally have no idea how cheap technology has revolutionized so many things that we now take for granted.
Back in 1957, Buddy Holly had to travel to Clovis, New Mexico, to record in Norman Petty‘s studio, where “Everyday” was recorded as the B-side of “Peggy Sue.” You couldn’t just program a synthesizer (or use an Omnichord) for your backup track, either. You had to have an actual band to accompany you, or else pay studio musicians at union scale. Because the equipment needed for recording — what Marx would call “the means of production” — was so expensive, getting access to studio time usually required the support of a manager or a record company. Young musicians would generally spend years playing bar gigs and such before they could hope to get a shot at a recording contract. By the time the Beatles signed with EMI in 1962, they had been together five years, played every dance hall in northern England and done four stints as a house band in bars in Hamburg, Germany.
What the advent of cheap high-quality recording technology has done is to topple the barriers between musical talent and the audience. You don’t need a manager or an agent, you don’t need a record company, a studio, a producer, a contract — no lawyers, no paperwork, nothing — to be able to record a song, produce a video and upload it to YouTube where, potentially, you could become an instant superstar.
Allison Young has about 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, and her most popular video has gotten nearly 400,000 views:
Wow — “Till There Was You,” a song which was a hit for Anita Bryant in 1959, the year I was born! Think of all the old songs that might be remade for YouTube by young performers. If I could persuade Allison Young to sign a contract, I’d help her find those songs (because I know them all), but such is the nature of technology that Ms. Young probably doesn’t think my knowledge as a would-be A&R man could be helpful to her. This is something else about technology. Because everybody can look up anything on Wikipedia, young people have little respect for the possession of actual knowledge. So I reckon my career as a latter-day Colonel Parker will never happen. Sigh.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! One of the commenters points out a math error:
“$450 / $5.15 (min wage in 1997) is 87 hours of labor ( 2 weeks of pay).”
Thanks. I actually can do basic math, I just didn’t bother to do it, and so my estimate was disastrously wrong.
